Liboria Corsello (Rizzo) - Last Name

I am willing to defer to you since you are more experienced in Geni and genealogy. I plan to wean myself from Ancestry because it is too confusing and that is likely how I screwed up with Francesca Di Franco--which I will work on but cannot do it for a day or so.

I also will look at the link you sent in the message about Francesca, re standards or naming--can't recall exactly now how you described it.

Having freelanced for textbook publishers, we always used a style sheet for each project. I would love to have something like that here for standardizing things when there are various versions of name spelling. I am doing it in my notes because I see so much wrong in census and other "official" documents. Even in Chicago in 1940!

On Geni and Ancestry the married name for woman is used as the last name with maiden name in parentheses but only sometimes. It seems that unless a Display Name is entered, Geni defaults to just first name and married name as surname. That is the case with Liboria's daughter, Giovanna Cariello. She was born Giovanna Corsello but Geni displays Giovanna Cariello--that must be her husband's last name though there is no husband info shown.

Unless I am missing something, Liboria was born a Rizzo and married a Corsello so her last name would be Corsello.

For some reason the Display Name on Liboria's record said Liboria Corsello. Geni did not pick up Rizzo even that is listed as her birth name. I changed her Display Name to read Liboria Corsello (Rizzo). A BIG problem I see with Geni is womens' names. As a married woman, she should be Liboria Rizzo Corsello. That is the standard format in real life! But there is no field for it or maybe the programming is crap.

Geni is soooo frustrating for me--that Display Name section seems to be set in stone and I cannot delete what is there and leave it blank if I want to--I can only edit it--on anyone's record.

After Liboria married, her last name WAS Corsello. But if you feel Rizzo is better, have at it with my blessings. :) I did add Liboria Corsello AND Liboria Rizzo in the AKA section.

I don't see Italian--English is my default. If you want to add Italian as another language, that's ok with me. I have never done it and given how freaky Geni seems to be, I am afraid to mess up more stuff so I did not add Italian.

Lisa

Have you looked at the Geni Name Preferences page? Click on your namein the top right and then "Account Settings" and then "Name Preferences" or go here: https://www.geni.com/account_settings/name_preferences

You can choose to display birth surnames and married names and middle names in various ways. There is also a setting for "Ignore display name (except Master Profiles)" so depending on how you have that set it could explain why you were seeing different behavior on some profiles. Ideally we want to make the best profile we can for an individual with sources and turn it into their Master Profile so that if someone comes along and adds a duplicate it gets merged in easily. We can also lock data fields to prevent mistakes from creeping in too.

In general I try to avoid using the "Display Name" field because then it makes some of the Geni name preferences irrelevant and people are forced to see what is in the "Display Name" field. For example if someone in Europe likes to see last names in CAPS and they check the box to "show last names in CAPS" and the display name is set to "Liboria Corsello (Rizzo)" it won't know what is the last name to display in CAPS. So I generally don't use the Display Name field. An example of a case where you certainly would see a "Display Name" is Bernadette Lazzara has her display name set to "Bernadette Peters" because everybody knows her by that name: Bernadette Peters

I have no reason to believe that Liboria Rizzo ever used her husband's last name. If she was born Liboria Rizzo she would have used that name her entire life and her death records states she was Liboria Rizzo. I have never seen any 1800s records in Altavilla imply that a female took their husband's last name at marriage. In general in Sicily and the rest of Italy and some other European countries you will find that females kept their last name and did not change their name at marriage. The whole topic can stretch into gender equality and actually being illegal to takes a husband's last name. The bottom line is that in her real life she was Liboria Rizzo...she was not Liboria Corsello after she married.

Now the reason I asked about her children or siblings is because for example if she had a sibling Vincenzo that came to the US and died in the US somebody could have wrote Vincenzo's obituary to say he was the brother of Liboria Rizzo because...technically that wouldn't be correct...

Now the reason you see Liboria's daughter Giovanna Cariello with the last name Cariello is not because that is her husband's name...because she would not have used her husband's name. That profile came from one of the other most thorough Altavilla researchers and the reason it says Cariello is because the 1830s and 1840s records seem to possibly say Cariello...or at minimum they are hard to read and/or scribbled looking....and sometimes faded or with inblots, etc.

It might be another puzzle to figure out. Those 1830s and 1840s records can be tough to read and some of this research was done on a dimly lit microfilm reader and that doesn't help. Now sometimes going back to the digital images to look at them and zoom in can make a big difference. Look at Giuseppa Corsello and click on "Sources" and view the death record for her husband Giovanni Guagliardo. Giuseppa's last name can easily be read to say Cariello rather than Corsello. Maybe it really does say Cariello and the spelling changed or varied over the years. We've seen that with names like Muceo/Mucia/Muscia and Chiovino/Iovino even in Sicily before coming to the US...

However after looking closer at some names we also found that we had a Cullotta line and a Culletta line in Altavilla that were apparently not the same, but the Cullotta family greatly outnumbered the Culletta that we didn't notice until we really looked and saw that they didn't fit together and they really were recorded differently.